


withdrawal

by pyknicGinger



Series: addiction is a hell, especially when you don't even know what you're addicted to [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, M/M, Post-Sburb
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-24
Updated: 2016-01-24
Packaged: 2018-05-16 00:23:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,731
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5806060
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pyknicGinger/pseuds/pyknicGinger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>the game ends but john remains unstuck from reality trying to find his friends through time and space, unable to age. dave searches for meaning in an empty life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	withdrawal

**Author's Note:**

> written while Fucked Up, posted at the insistence of [kaus](http://charoum.tumblr.com/)

They say that God watches over the world, but doesn't interfere. They say He appears without warning—anywhere, at any random moment—and has done so since the dawn of time. They say He never stays long enough to actively dissuade conflict, to change the course of history, but that His presence alone breathes a kind of inhuman power—one that can stop armies in their tracks, change the hearts of kings, and bring nations to their knees.

They say that God is always looking for something, but no one knows what.

Scholars and priests and leaders have claimed, throughout the ages, to know. Enlightened individuals have written books, given sermons, and held ceremonies to summon God, hoping that He will give them the answers to pointless questions—questions about a kind of higher purpose, about meaning and reason and rationality. Problems that, even if solved, wouldn't change anything about the world.

God never comes when He is called, and this only serves to bring those who believe in Him even closer to their faith, because they come to the conclusion  that they are so far beneath Him, He would not stoop to bless them with His presence. They are awed, and so it has continued for centuries.

You don't believe in God, because you don't believe in things that you can't see. It doesn't make sense to you—why would God exist, having supposedly created the world, only to ignore its struggles? Its pain? The faithful justify His apathy by calling it some kind of lesson, but you think maybe that's a huge load bullshit.

You take a long drag from your cigarette, relishing in the rough burn as smoke hits the back of your throat, trailing into your lungs. You hold it there, breathing in a second time without exhaling the first, until you feel like your chest is about to explode, and then you let it go. Smoke curls up into the sky, dancing a fluid tango with the snow still falling through the night, and you watch it without thinking much of anything.

Your head aches, a kind of thrumming in your temples and behind your forehead. Thinking hurts.

The paper filter, burned at the ends and all used up, falls from your fingers and lands in a snowdrift. You don't bother putting in the effort to flick it, or to toss it. You just drop it where you're standing, shove your hands in the pockets of your wool coat, and walk away. The old campus buildings light up the strange, reflective world around you, soft orange lights warming up the atmosphere but not the temperature.

(But you are not cold.)

You don't believe in God, but you have spent your whole life studying Him, and you don't know why.

You are in your twenties, but for some reason you feel ancient—weighed down by something you can't see, can't hear. Something you don't understand. Your insides are always on fire, burning up, and you need answers to questions you don't know how to ask. The drive of those who believe in God comforts you, in a way, because you're both searching beyond yourselves.

The snow is deep around you, and your steps sink mid-shin as you walk. There's no one around you—it's late, sometime near three in the morning, and the silence of the night is both wonderful (you don't have to listen to anyone) and terrible (but you can still hear everything, a voice in the back of your mind whispering words you can't quite hear). You reenter the university library and pick up the old book where you'd left off, the one from centuries ago telling of how God had stopped the fall of two empires with four words, just four words.

_This isn't right, either._

You read the phrase over and over, and after a while you think maybe you can hear a voice repeating them back.

* * *

God hasn't been seen for hundreds of years, and His following—though devout as ever—has dwindled, abandoned as the world turns to science and reason for its answers. This is good, you think, because science and reason are rooted in fact. But logic hasn't given you anything, so you keep searching in your own way. You keep looking for the dead God you don't believe in.

Snow continues to fall outside, never-ending, and you wonder why you're here. You hate Washington, you hate the state and the weather and the people, but you can't leave. Every time you try, you feel empty inside. Hollowed out and gutted, like you're missing a piece of yourself. The feeling never goes away, but it eases when you're here.

You're walking, now, in desperate need of coffee and another pack of cheap, marketable cancer. It's day, and there are others around, all trudging through, concentrating on each step so they don't fall and break their necks on the ice. You have a scarf pulled tight over your mouth, tucked under your coat, and your hands are shaking in your pockets. You can't remember the last time you had anything to eat, but you aren't hungry.

Someone shouts—the happy kind of yell a person makes when they see someone far away that they know, that they're glad to see—and it's such a sharp sound through the tense quiet you jump, slipping, landing on your ass in the snow, cursing through your scarf as the force snaps your frozen lip between your teeth and you taste blood. The shout is irrelevant, born of some fleeting emotion felt by someone you don't care about, and suddenly you're angry.

You spend the rest of the day pissed, chain-smoking next to the open window of your apartment, dropping ash onto the old books you've stolen from the library and not giving a single fuck about what the old woman who runs the place might say later. You skip all of your classes, and fall asleep with snow in your white hair.

* * *

Your brother visits you the next day, panicked and angry, having driven thousands of miles from Texas just to find you. Apparently you haven't been answering your phone for weeks. You can't confirm or deny that anyone has called you, though, because you don't even know where it is and at this point it's probably long dead, anyway. Your charger is missing, too, so even if you found it there isn't much you could do.

He tells you that you look like shit, that you've lost weight and have the kind of bags under your eyes that old men who've seen too much carry around with them, but you ignore him. He starts shouting, begging you to take care of yourself, but you just push past him and go back to the library. He isn't a student, so he can't follow you.

You pass out on the floor, wedged between a shelf and the wall, and dream of the sea.

* * *

When you wake up, it's dark outside, and the building is empty. Your head is hurting again, you need to go outside, and there's a kind of pull in your brain that's so strong you almost fall when you try to stand up. Your left leg is asleep and your chest feels like there's an inferno burning in your lungs.

There is no one around when you finally sit in the snow, hands shaking too much to properly spark your lighter, and it takes a full five minutes to get your cigarette started. When you finally do, you close your eyes and drink it in, relishing in the hell you've made for yourself. The self-inflicted agony of dependence. The road of self-destruction you've paved out, piece by piece, with no end in sight.

When you open them again, you wonder if you've finally lost your mind.

Because there, more than thirty feet away, is a boy.

He's lying on his back in the snow, half-buried and too young to be a student. His eyes are closed, his hair is black, and you think he might be crying. (There isn't a sound, though, so you could be imagining it.) You wonder if he's been there a long time, if you'd missed him when you first came outside, because there are no footprints around him, like they've been covered up by the storm or like he just fell from the sky. You wonder if he's dead.

Curious, confused, and still dizzy, you stand, shuffling through the night with footsteps that sound too loud to be real. Footsteps like thunder. The boy doesn't look up or turn his head or open his eyes, so you think maybe he really _is_ dead until you get up right next to him, standing over his body, and see the rise and fall of his chest. Corpses don't breathe, so that's at least something.

He sighs, and his breath curls up like the smoke from your cigarettes, and instead of disappearing like any other person's it wafts over you, warm and smelling like salt and something else, something sweet. You feel like you've been embraced, and you suddenly want to run away.

(The boy really is crying, you see now. But he's smiling, too.)

And when he opens his mouth, the voice that comes out is too familiar, so familiar you really _do_ take a step back, tripping over the mounds of snow in your wake, falling on your ass a second time. Because it's the same voice you hear in your head, the one in your dreams, the one that reminds you sometimes to eat when it's been too long and to sleep when you haven't rested in days. The one that tells you it's okay to weep when you feel empty, even though you don't have a reason to because you've been given everything in the world. The one you've been looking for.

And quietly, gently, with so much emotion you think you feel the whole world break around you, he says, "This is right, this is it," and it flows around you, echoing through the campus courtyard like the wind itself.

And you realize that God is a sixteen-year-old boy dressed in blue, just as lost as you are, and He'd been searching for you just as much as you'd been searching for Him.

(He is someone who everyone knows, but no one remembers.)


End file.
